Voting Results: The Value of the Sidebar Archive Section
The votes are in and the winner, taking 75% of the votes, is “the standard archive-by-month sidebar section adds NO value to a blog.”
A standard part of most WordPress themes, the by-month-archive sidebar provides a link which allow a visitor to quickly see a chronological listing of all the posts for a given month. Here’s what the voters had to say about the archive sidebar section:
What the Voters Said About the Question
Graphic designer David Airey from the blog of the same name (davidairey.com) didn’t voice an opinion one way or the other, but was “interested in finding out the results.”
Armen from iffect.net thought the by-month-archive section was”not that important. For a young blog, they can have a negative effect because visitors see it’s new, and so it loses credibility. For an old blog, the vast amount of links can be overwhelming, and so people avoid clicking on any of them.”
Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips has been advocating for a long time that “…monthly archives on the sidebar are a waste! If you really want to have archives, use a single page that lists all your posts.”
Ben Yoskovitz from The Instigator Blog said he “removed the Monthly Archive in the sidebar some time ago. [He] did put an Archive link at the top of Instigator Blog, and [used] a plugin to display the archive sorted by month. [He doesn't] track how many people click there and visit the archive - [his] guess: very, very few. [He] also moved to a Category Cloud instead of a laundry list. In some ways it better represents the mish mash of things [he] writes about, but [he's] never measured its effectiveness for people using the site.”
Ilker from The Thinking Blog isn’t “sure [that] having a monthly archive like [mine] helps much for the reader. What [I] might need, though, is [to] get an archive similar to the one [that she uses on her blog].”
Thanks for the Votes
Thanks to everyone that voted and special thanks to all those that left comments in response to the question. Looks like it’s time for me to strip that by-month-archive section form my sidebar and replace it with something a little more useful.
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Filed under: Blogging Related
Nice use of anchor text there, Bret. Thanks.
My opinion is that you should remove the archives section. Your sitemap page is much more useful in my opinion, and you could always change that to list articles by month if you so desired.
All the best.
Thanks for the suggestion David. I’m going to remove the archive section later this week and replace it with something that adds a little more value to TechTraction readers.
If you have a site map feature, then you might not need the Monthly Archive in your sidebar.
Hi KRG. That’s an excellent point I had never thought of. I do have a sitemap and it’s automatically updated with a plugin, and a link to the sitemap is easily accessible under the “pages” category at the top of the first sidebar. Thanks for the comment and tip.